WHEN ANXIETY COMES TO BAT

Published: March 8, 1987

(Page 2 of 4)

His symptoms grew worse in Boston, where the center-field bleachers in Fenway Park, just 380 feet from home plate, seem to insinuate themselves onto the playing field, creeping in on the grass in right. The Boston fans - in claustrophobic proximity to the players - are famed for abusing rival players. Eisenreich didn't make it through the fourth inning. The next day, the fans were again merciless, and by the third inning, he was in the dugout. He was leaving each game an inning earlier than the last. It was like a countdown. The following day in Milwaukee, just minutes before he was to play, Eisenreich scratched himself from the starting lineup. He suited up, but he stayed in the clubhouse.

Until now, Eisenreich had been able to control his breathing difficulties by coming off the field. But in Milwaukee, he was stricken for the first time in the clubhouse. Dick Martin found Eisenreich walking around nervously, gulping air and belching. Dr. Paul A. Jacobs, the team physician for the Brewers, had him rushed to Mount Sinai Medical Center in downtown Milwaukee. There, doctors in the emergency room injected Eisenreich with sedatives, with little effect. He was allowed to return to his hotel that evening. By the next morning, he appeared to be calmer, but his inner turmoil was far from over. For the next two days, while the Twins completed the Milwaukee road trip, he huddled in the corner of his room, a blanket pulled over his head.

F ARM PRICES ARE A prominent feature on the television news in St. Cloud, Minn., a sprawling rural community of 40,000, an hour's drive northwest of Minneapolis on the banks of the Mississippi. St. Cloud State University dominates the rehabilitated central business district. Eisenreich was a sophomore there in 1980, when the Twins selected him in the 16th round of the annual amateur draft.

Eisenreich lives a few miles outside of town at the home of his parents. It is a modest, two-story white clapboard house set on a small plot of land in a residential section. He is the third of five children; only he and his younger brother still live at home. His father, Cliff, 69 years old, is a retired schoolteacher who taught at the local reformatory; his mother, Ann, who is 59, keeps house.

Eisenreich is a quiet man who sleeps in most mornings and stays around the house most days. He attends nearby Holy Spirit Church each Sunday. Occasionally, he subs in the men's bowling league at the Southway Bowl, down the road from his parents' home. During the winter, he spends much of his time deer hunting, frequently from a tree blind, with bow and arrow. At 27, he appears youthful and powerfully built. He is six feet and weighs 180 pounds. He has a thatch of black curly hair and hawkish features. His blue eyes peer out expectantly beneath a sloping brow. When he talks, the muscles in his neck tense into tight cords, and his sinuous forearms relax and contract rhythmically.

''This has always happened to me.'' he says, referring to the twitching. His speech is slanted by the long, swooping vowels of the Middle West. ''It just got really bad when I was with the Twins. I don't know why. Usually when I was in a situation like that - stuck on my breathing - it would always end before I would get too hyped up. I could control it.''

The tics began when Eisenreich was in grade school. They so concerned his father, and puzzled the family physician, that he was taken for psychiatric evaluations. No diagnosis, as far as he knows, was ever arrived at.

As a boy, he even felt uncomfortable sitting in the first pews at church. ''I still sit in the back,'' he says. ''It doesn't help, but it eases my mind.''

Dennis Lorsung, Eisenreich's baseball coach at St. Cloud State, recalls that ''Jim was always making some sort of weird noise or movement out there in the field. At first, the other outfielders noticed, but after a while they realized that it was just Jim.'' Neither Lorsung nor Pat Dolan, Eisenreich's high school coach, ever recall him being hampered by his tics, or being forced to come off the field by his breathing spells.

Eisenreich contends that performance was not his problem in the majors, though he admits that something did change for him in the big leagues. ''People automatically assumed that I had stage fright,'' he says. ''I told the Twins that I wasn't nervous. I told the press that. But everyone just wanted to believe what the Twins wanted to believe.''

E ISENREICH WAS hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation after the Twins returned to Minnesota from the Milwaukee road trip. His psychiatric treatment continued throughout the season in regular, but informal, sessions with Dr. Joseph L. Gendron, a psychiatrist affiliated with St. Mary's Hospital in Minneapolis. Rather than go to the doctor's office, Eisenreich would meet with Dr. Gendron in the hospital lobby.

Three possible diagnoses emerged: performance anxiety, a grinding, debilitating fear of failure that most people experience as stage fright; agoraphobia, the fear of being in open or public places, and Tourettes Syndrome, a neurochemical disorder whose symptoms can include uncontrollable body movements or vocalizations that occur at inappropriate moments.